The soon-to-be-established Road Safety Authority (RSA), which is responsible for vehicle and driving standards, road safety and managing more than 50 driving test centres across Ireland, is planning a major technology investment in financial systems to handle accounts, employees’ payroll, pension management and travel expenses.
The RSA is currently being established by the Government to take responsibility for a broad spectrum of road safety, including driver education, road safety promotion, driver testing, driver licensing, vehicle standards, road haulage and research.
The organisation’s headquarters will be located in Ballina, Co Mayo with a sub-office in Loughrea, Co Galway.
A project team has been set up to establish the RSA, which will have strong links with the Department of Transport. While staffing arrangements are not yet finalised, some 300 staff are currently delivering the functions that the RSA will be responsible for, including 130 staff in driving test centres across Ireland.
The Department of Transport has published three separate tenders on behalf of the RSA seeking various IT systems capable of managing the accounts of the new organisation.
In the first tender it is seeking a financial management system capable of management reporting, general ledger and budgeting, accounts payable and receivable, cash management, inventory management, cost allocation and asset management. It is also seeking hardware to integrate into the RSA network infrastructure.
The second tender seeks the provision of a system for the management of pensions for RSA staff with self-service capabilities enabling employees to view their pension information online.
According to the third and final tender, the RSA is seeking a payroll system and time and attendance system capable of processing more than 300 staff with the ability to expand to include former or retired employees. The system, it says, must be able to deal with public sector pay requirements, such as PRSI rates, as well as working arrangements such as flexitime and parental leave.
Along with being able to extract to Excel, the new system must be able to do standard payslip applications such as deduction summaries and gross to net reports.
By John Kennedy
